Is spears polearms when runewords?

So there are polearms and Spears, both are used a lot with act2 mercs.
But I see a lot of the runewords, one of them Insight say it works in s polearm. But on the other side iv seen no rune recipe that talks about spears.
Is spears only useable with runewords when the recipe says "all weapons" or "melee weapons" or is spears, pikes etc baked into another group?

Yeah if the runeword says all ‘melee weapons’, or ‘all weapons’, that imply spears as well.

If runeword says specific types, then the runeword will only work for that specific weapon type

In special
Infinity and Pride are commonly used for Act 2 Merc and can be made in Spears or Polearms
(only Polearm on older versions of the game...)


Insight still only in Polearms...

maraxion wrote: 6 months ago

iv seen no rune recipe that talks about spears.
Is spears only useable with runewords when the recipe says "all weapons" or "melee weapons" or is spears, pikes etc baked into another group?

There are

Spear rune words in D2R. There weren't any

Spear-specific rune words back in LoD, but in D2R they changed some polearm specific rune words to also work in spears (and amazon spears). These all list spears as a possible base.

You can filter the database on this very site for

Spear rune words:
runewords/#filter=Spears

Infinity, Obedience and Pride. These used to be polearm-only, but now work in both polearm and spears.

Make sure you look at sites that have been updated for D2R, there are still plenty of sites like wikis out there that were made for LoD that haven't been updated for D2R (I'm not saying they need to be - LoD is still playable after all - you just need to be careful when looking up stuff online).

Item types (not only weapons, but also armor) form a hierarchy. This hierarchy is used by various game mechanics, primarily by affixes and runewords. particular item type is also considered of its supertypes (yes, there can be multiple supertypes). So, for instance, a missile weapon runeword can be made in either crossbows or bows (subtypes of missile weapons), including Amazon bows (a subtype of bows). This also applies to affixes: diferent types of weapons can roll melee weapon affixes - unless a subtype is specifically excluded (so, for instance, staves and wands cannot roll some melee affixes, as they'd be useless on such bases).
I think it's the best to see it as an image:
(From Amazon Basin, but there were complaints about the site not working, hence the repost.)

However, one must be careful, as in-game descriptions of bases are often wrong. For instance, hammers are NOT maces.

Interesting one ! Are sin katars considered h2h ?

All katars (claws, Assassin-only weapons) are h2h.
But only higher exceptional and all elite katars are h2h2 - this is a technical subtype used to make only higher weapons roll staffmods. Otherwise we'd farm Normal for godly +6 LS katars with almost no requirements .

Since some of the item type names are different in the data files (used as a source for this graph) than in the game, I've made another graph to make it clear, with class-specific item types. For legibility, it includes only weapons and armor; a full graph with gems, tomes and other junk would be unreadable. By the way, Exile is the only RW that uses a class-specific base (pala). Since there are no other Paladin items, it is effectively the same as using ashd and excluding shld.

And an idea for a mod: make a RW with clas as a base, so each class has a different experience. I'd be quite unbalanced, though!